"Né, minha filha?": efeitos de um vocativo no discurso cômico

Abstract

This article analyzes the comic discourse in the materiality of memes whose emergence was due to the resumption of the original formulation Solidão, né, minha filha (‘Loneliness, right, my daughter?’). This structure remains particularly stable in the regularity of the contracted form né (‘right; aren’t you’) articulates to the vocative minha filha (‘my daughter’) in a tag question structure. The formulation took place in an episode of the television program Fantástico, in whch the doctor Drauzio Varella made a special report about the living conditions of trans women in a Brazilian prison. In the light of Discourse Analysis, the synchronic existence of the operation of resuming the tragic by the comic is part of a long tradition of similar production conditions from a linguistic and historical perspective. From a linguistic perspective, the comic discourse reverberates classic statements such as “Man is the only animal that laughs”, “If tragedy elevates, the comic lowers”, “The comic is a certain error”. From a historical perspective, it revives the memory of laughter in the context of a pandemic. The scenes of Aristophanes in the context of war return and, in correlation with this, one of the most repeated statements in his work: “May the plague suffocate you!” – allusion to the plague that devastated Athens in 430 BC. It also returns the figures of Gargantua, by Rabelais, notably in the references made in the novel to the plague and to active and revolted laughing. By the effects of meaning produced by the comic discourse inscribed in the memes, especially by the vocative minha filha connected to the contracted form né, it is possible to conclude that laughter assumes three forms in our corpus, namely, the disheartened, the nonconformist and the revolted.